by Mary Nealy
Several gnats tickled his face. As he watched them lazily circle, he could feel the gnats he’d inhaled the morning he’d found Melody. He could taste the ones he’d swallowed.
He couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping here. “I could go to the shelter,” he said to the empty room, but he knew he couldn’t do it. Not tonight. He went to his bedroom, picked up the top mattress from his twin bed, and carried it—sheets, blankets, and all—out of his apartment and into his business office across the hall. He tossed it on the floor and dropped down on it.
The office was simply another converted apartment. A dim streetlight cast a shadowy light through the window. He lay there and stared sightlessly at the ceiling in the dark room. He couldn’t relax and he finally figured out why. He hadn’t locked the door. The office, with its old computer and its petty cash, was one of the few doors that was routinely locked.
“The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.” “To live is Christ and to die is gain.” He waited for God’s peace to settle on him. “If God is for us, who can be against. “
He believed it. He believed wholeheartedly in God. But he still had to admit defeat and get up and throw the dead bolt. While he was up he doubled-checked the windows. Then he touched his cell phone and the spare Keren had left.
He said to the empty room, “Where are you, Pravus?”
The silence of the room mocked him.
In despair, he whispered, “Who are you killing tonight?”
CHAPTER TWENTY–TWO
So they took soot from a furnace and stood before Pharaoh. Moses tossed it into the air, and festering boils broke out on people and animals.
Pravus closed his father’s special Bible, the slim one still written in the ancient Latin. Pravus couldn’t read the words, but his father had told him what it said. He remembered everything.
He went to the woman, taped securely to the high table. Pravus looked at the gown hanging beside her. Eamus meus natio meare. Pestis ex ulcus.
Then he looked at her.
Boils.
He’d used burns. It was close enough. The reverend said he was like the magicians copying Moses’ tricks. He’d used that cold, hard policeman voice, and Pravus nearly choked on hate.
Pravus wanted fear.
The reverend had become less afraid in the last few days. The beast whispered that it was because Pravus had abandoned his path of choosing victims to maximize the reverend’s pain.
He’d have to fix that. He’d gotten so involved with the pleasure of the kill and the hunger for more, he’d forgotten his search for freedom for his people.
Pravus waited for full dark, then he left his plague of boils to be found later. It was getting more difficult to dump the bodies.
The police were out in force in the area around the mission. The park was staked out around the clock. He knew from police questioning that the car had been identified, and unless it was an emergency, he kept it out of sight in the underground parking lot beneath a condemned building.
Everyone was watchful. Pravus thrilled at the challenge.
When he had relieved himself of the burden, he wandered about with his typical aimless stroll, walking like he was a weakling, which covered the corded strength he’d gained by hours of exercise. He needed the strength to carry his victims so he could present the plagues to the reverend.
He went into his building determined to change and emerge a new man. Clean and well dressed. The beard that so completely changed the shape of his face, unglued and left behind.
It didn’t happen, though. He couldn’t shave. His hand shook too badly. And the beast pushed him, prodded, prowled, and gnawed.
He needed a new cell phone. But he didn’t have the patience to follow an older couple or search a car in a parking lot or an unlocked garage.
Instead he went to a store and bought one of those phones you could buy minutes with. There was no record of who bought those—the number wasn’t connected to his name, since he paid cash. Untraceable, Pravus was sure.
When he had it ready, he had a few more things to do, then he’d get back to his true purpose—his need to punish the reverend.
“So what’s the deal with you and the preacher?” O’Shea settled his ample backside in his desk chair and talked around a mouthful of meatball sub.
Keren kept her head down by sheer force of will. She was seeing double from hours of going over Caldwell’s phone records—the phone records of the six cell phones he’d stolen so far—his bank records before he cleaned out his accounts, and the videos taken of the crowds at the park. She knew the exact time she’d felt the demon there and she checked her time against the videos. But all the suspects were there and they all walked away together right at that time. It made her even more certain it was one of them, but there was no way to eliminate anybody.
The task force had met again. They’d traced the car to Murray … who had reported it stolen. Fingerprints of three of the men—the ones they could catch up with—had turned up nothing interesting. Dyson had come up with a new profile, but the man seemed real cranky about the generalizations. They’d heard every detail of what Higgins had found about Francis Caldwell’s childhood. Which wasn’t much. His parents were both deceased. Nothing about either death had raised red flags at the time, but now Keren had to wonder.
She made herself very busy fussing with a stain on the report in front of her. It needed to be cleaned up immediately.
She rose from her seat. “I’d better get a damp cloth. We don’t—”
“Sit,” O’Shea barked.
Keren didn’t sit. “You don’t give me orders, Mick.” They’d received a sketchy report that couldn’t be confirmed of a homeless woman, known on the street as Lupe, being snatched. Paul hadn’t been in. There was no report of a phone call. No threat to blow something up. Keren missed talking the case over with him, but she couldn’t stand dragging him back into the investigation.
“Sure I do.” O’Shea smirked. “I’m senior officer around here, and you’re just a little baby girl cop.”
The waiting was driving her crazy. She didn’t need to look up and see double of O’Shea. And she sure wasn’t going to answer his snoopy questions.
Keren resisted the urge to slug him. O’Shea was trying to distract her with his obnoxiousness so she’d quit watching her mouth. “You’re not senior when it comes to asking me questions like that.”
O’Shea took another huge bite of his sandwich and chewed. Way before all the food was swallowed, he asked, “You know what I think?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” Keren enjoyed the tiny flash of caution in O’Shea’s eyes. He’d heard that sweet tone before. He knew his potential for becoming a victim of assault and battery was high and increasing by the moment.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite scared enough. “I think you’re hot for each other.”
“Mick!”
“What?”
“Don’t talk like that. Hot? He’s a man of the cloth for heaven’s sake! And what about me? You know I don’t … I mean no man’s gonna … I mean … oh, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” O’Shea held up both hands to defend himself, one clutching the half-eaten sandwich. “Okay, pick another word.”
“Well, I’d say we’re …” Keren caught herself. She’d spent plenty of time with O’Shea in the interrogation room, and she knew how good he was. He could make people admit to crimes they’d just thought about committing. Sometimes the lawyers, who were sitting in on the questioning, broke down and confessed to crimes they’d committed, unrelated to the case at hand. He didn’t usually use his talents on her, though.
She switched to attack mode just to even the playing field. “What’za matter, Mick, your pathetic life so boring you have to entertain yourself by making stuff up about me?”
O’Shea nodded, studying her like she was a menu at Burger King. “Good girl, I almost got you, but you recovered. So …” He returned to his san
dwich and the beginning. “What’s the deal with you and the preacher?”
Keren rolled her eyes. She decided the statute of limitations was up on O’Shea’s order to sit, so she plopped back into her chair. “There’s no deal.”
“C’mon, honey, give. This is your old buddy Mick talking. I’ve seen the way you look at each other when you think no one is watching.”
“How does he look at me?” Keren caught herself again. Man, he was good. “I mean, not that you’re right, but tell me, just so I know what you’re imagining.”
O’Shea laughed.
Keren’s cheeks heated up.
O’Shea had, in many ways, stepped in and become a father to her since her own parents had started going to Fort Lauderdale for the winter and traveling extensively in a Winnebago year-round—except she’d have never talked so rudely to her father.
“Is there any chance you might choke to death on a meatball?”
“You don’t have that kind of luck.”
Finally, just to shut him up, she said, “Have you noticed that the preacher man is turning back into a cop?”
“Yeah, and it’s driving him nuts.” O’Shea nodded. “He falls into the lingo, changes his tone of voice and the way he holds himself. His whole attitude changes. Then he freezes up when he says something particularly cold blooded, and I can see the guilt. The poor guy’s struggling.”
“He asked me for a gun the night LaToya was dumped.”
“That was enough to make anyone fighting mad,” O’Shea said grimly.
“He asked for the gun in the heat of the moment, and he regretted it afterward,” Keren continued. “Then, only days later, when we went into Caldwell’s apartment building, he asked again. And this time he meant it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he shows up with a piece at the next dump site.”
“Does he have a license?” O’Shea, ever the cop, asked.
Keren shrugged. “They usually let former cops have one. I don’t know about concealed carry. That’s a little tougher.”
“They’d give him one,” O’Shea said with certainty. “Wanting to blow someone away has gotta be tearing him up inside. The day we first met him, in the hospital, I got the idea he was kind of meek. Strong in his convictions, but no dynamo, if you get what I mean.”
“Well, you were wrong—as usual.” Keren waited for O’Shea to turn red. He obliged her, then she laughed in his face. “He’s a tough cookie, even in preacher mode. But now he’s losing it. He’s a decent guy who left the hassles of law enforcement behind, and now it’s like he’s being taken over by it.”
“Is that admiration I hear?”
“Of course I admire him. He’s …” Keren caught herself again and fell silent.
“He could rejoin the force,” O’Shea said. “I’ve asked around. He was a good cop. As good as it gets.”
Keren shook her head. “I’d hate to see him do that. He has such peace in his life at that mission.”
“ ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,’“ O’Shea said.
Keren was always startled when O’Shea came up with something Christian. She knew he was a man of faith, and she’d especially liked him because he respected her own strong beliefs, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve.
“And we’re the sword, is that what you’re saying?” She was used to the idea that she battled evil, but she’d never heard it put quite that way before.
O’Shea hunched one shoulder. “On this case, with Caldwell, I’d say for sure we’re the sword. Somebody’s gotta be the sword, cuz this guy needs a sword taken to him—bad.”
Keren nodded and stared into space, thinking about how desperately they needed to stop Caldwell.
Finally, O’Shea broke the silence. “So what’s the deal with you and the preacher?”
Keren threw her coffee cup at him. She wished it was stoneware full of boiling hot coffee instead of Styrofoam and empty.
Keren crawled out of the lousy cot in the police lounge the next morning around five. “I want my apartment back,” she growled to no one, because no one else was stupid enough to sleep here.
Except she didn’t want her apartment back. No way did she want to sleep in that room with her memory of Katrina Hardcastle and all those flies.
She showered at the station house. She’d brought half her wardrobe in by now, and when she got out to her desk, O’Shea was waiting for her like the specter of death.
“Another one?” Keren should have saved her breath. The answer was obvious.
“I just got the word that a body was dumped. I don’t have any details, just an address.” O’Shea headed for the door. “A half a block from the mission.”
“We’ve got cops all over that area! How is he getting in?”
O’Shea shrugged and kept moving.
Keren fell into step alongside him. “Why do you suppose he writes in Latin?”
O’Shea said, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe when we get him, we’ll find a connection in his twisted brain to explain it. Maybe, in the end, he’s just a loon.”
“Boils this time,” Keren remembered. “Pestus ex ulcus, isn’t that right? The plague of boils?”
O’Shea didn’t answer her, and she didn’t want him to.
“Should I call Morris?” O’Shea had his phone out of his pocket.
“Leave him for now.” Keren started jogging down the stairs. “It’s so early you might wake him up. If he’s sleeping for once, let him get another hour or two. There’s no rush. We can just walk over and talk to him from the dump site. There’s nothing he can do anyway.”
“Identify her.”
Keren sighed. She was all too sure Paul would be able to identify her.
Keren moved faster, but what she wanted to do was run away.
CHAPTER TWENTY–THREE
Throughout Egypt hail struck everything in the fields—both people and animals; it beat down everything growing in the fields and stripped every tree.
Pravus crooned to the woman in front of him, “I’ve got the perfect place for you. It’s going to be cold, but you won’t care for long.”
He was finding his work to be more of a chore. Eluding the police was heady, but the beast told him his victims were unworthy.
He didn’t even bother to call the preacher this time. Pravus hated to admit it, but he was becoming bored with his creations and living now only for the kill. He worked away, but he couldn’t put the love he needed into his art.
And then, like any true artist, he was inspired. He needed to pick a moment when the reverend was distracted, and he knew just how to do that—how to listen in on his room. Strike while the reverend slept.
He went to the window to look down on the mission, and the final piece of the next child he’d create came to him instantly, when he saw pretty little Rosita.
In spite of all the nickel-sized burn marks on her, Paul easily identified the schizophrenic Hispanic woman who came and went from the mission.
He had to fight back his rage when he stood over her, thrown away like garbage in an alley.
“I should be praying,” he said to O’Shea. “Or crying.”
O’Shea shrugged.
“If I look in a mirror, will my eyes be as detached and cool as yours?” Paul shoved his hands in his pockets to keep them from hitting something.
O’Shea looked away from the mutilated body. He stared at Paul but didn’t say anything.
Paul could feel his own cold-blooded cop personality oozing out of him. “Let’s get this over with.”
“The FBI just pulled Keren aside to ask her some questions. She’ll be back in a minute. She’ll want to hear your statement, maybe ask some questions.”
“I’m not waiting around.” He gave his statement, then he went straight back to the Lighthouse.
He went later to visit LaToya. She lay immobilized in the hospital bed. The beeping monitor was the only thing that proved she was alive.
Caldwell didn’t call.
The streets around the mission wer
e so heavily patrolled that the vagrants and gangs were driven inside or underground. By the end of the day, there wasn’t a single person in the mission. No one showed up for the evening meal.
Paul ran down a list in his head of every woman he knew who lived on the streets. He tried to figure out a way to track them down and bring them inside for the night. Even thinking about it was a waste of time. He’d never find them, and if, by some fluke he did, they wouldn’t come with him unless he used force.
He considered using force—considered it hard. In the end he stayed inside and prayed.
His prayers seemed futile, and he thought about the gun permit he’d been issued when he left the force. He was tempted to get one. He was sorely tempted to walk a foot patrol up and down the South Side, hunting Caldwell. Make himself an easy target to see if he could draw this maniac out.
Pounding awakened Paul after only a couple hours of restless, nightmare-plagued sleep.
Coming instantly awake, something he’d learned on the force, he rolled off the mattress, got to his feet, and yanked the door open.
Higgins was in the hall. “We’ve got another one.” He jerked his head toward the stairway. “I’ll wait for you downstairs.”
“What is going on? Why didn’t he call? Why is there no sign delivered to me? Why no threats, no bombs?” Paul took the time to pull on his running shoes and was after Higgins in seconds, wearing the jogging suit he slept in.
Higgins led the way to a seedy bar a block from the mission.
Higgins pushed his way through a crowd, Paul right on his heels, until Paul saw the ghastly contents of the bar’s ice machine.
Paul saw the gaping eyes and the cold blue skin. “Talking Bertha.”
“One of yours?” Higgins asked.
“One of mine.” Paul analyzed the position of the body. The medical examiner, a young black man, fixed plastic bags over the woman’s hands, hoping to preserve evidence under her fingernails.